1306: gardyloo Jul 8, 2018

People are not very good at simply adopting a word into another language without any kind of change; either spelling will influence how people speak (e.g. 'paella' in Britain), or more often accent and stress change. This is particularly common when a phoneme or combination thereof exists in one language but not another. When the French phrase "gardez l'eau" ("mind the water") was adopted as 'gardyloo' into Scottish English as an exclamation one would say before emptying a chamberpot out of a window (which was common-practice until as late as the 1940's), the pronunciation changed in many key ways. Scottish and French have different iterations of what is represented with the letter R—[r] and [ʁ] respectively—but also, English doesn't end words on the sound [o] on its own, and will use the sound [u]. The middle-vowel changes as well, but only slightly. There are countless examples of the way in which sounds change across even just these two languages, especially considering how much of English vocabulary comes from French (usually Old French) origin. Notably, 'gardyloo' is not related to 'loo' as in 'toilet'.

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